RedSpark

Back on January 7, 2015, Sprint posted the following: Sprint Closes on $2.1 Billion of Financing with Three New Vendor Financing Agreements and Existing Loan Expansion OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (BUSINESS WIRE), January 07, 2015 - Sprint Corporation (NYSE: S) announced today that it has signed three new vendor financing facilities totaling $1.8 billion to purchase 2.5 GHz network equipment and related services from key suppliers. Sprint also amended and expanded by $300 million its credit relationship with Export Development Canada (EDC) as well as amended the terms of its existing secured equipment credit facility. “These deals provide Sprint with greater flexibility and liquidity options as we focus on growing the business and investing in our network,” said Joe Euteneuer, Sprint’s Chief Financial Officer. The three new vendor financing agreements are: A secured facility for up to $800 million from Nokia Networks maturing in June 2021. It is backed by credit insurance provided by Finnvera plc, the export credit agency of Finland. A secured facility for up to $750 million from Samsung maturing in Dec. 2022. It is backed by credit insurance provided by the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (Ksure), the export credit agency of Korea. A secured facility for up to $250 million from ALU maturing in Dec. 2021. It is backed by credit insurance provided by Delcredere | Ducroire (D/D), the export credit agency of Belgium.

Sprint previously extended it because it was working. And not every one of those customers ultimately chooses the 50% off plan from the offer page or when in the store. It starts a conversation and gets people in the store or on the website. Some of those customers wind up choosing the $70/month Unlimited Plan instead ($60 for each additional line if they want to add friends/family to it), which isn't discounted. It's a good question. We'll see.

If you're that much of a believer, buy some Sprint stock! Investing is based on "hope" you know....

Apparently, Marcelo just sent out a letter to employees explaining the reasons for moving up the Earnings Call: Via the Sprint Subreddit

Competitive intelligence is a very important thing to keep in mind here. Sprint clearly doesn't want to give away any information that a competitor can take advantage of to the detriment of Sprint, and even the most seemingly innocuous piece of info can be a gold mine for the competition to know in terms of deducing Sprint's resources or strategy. These competing companies have multiple people on staff, or retain outside experts to do competitive intelligence modeling based on every single utterance a Sprint Executive makes. These Sprint executives are clearly well aware of this, and I'm glad Sprint is being smart about how this is handled.

Some of your questions were addressed in the recent Harrison Wiley video. Hopefully the others are addressed in the upcoming 3Q2015 Earnings Call on Tuesday. John Saw and Güenther Ottenforfer made it clear that they didn't want to give away the playbook to the competition. John also said they want to "do more and talk less." Both agreed there's "secret sauce" that they don't want to talk about for competitive reasons. Wow: Look at how Sprint's improving, while T-Mobile just absolutely plummeted to ZERO since September 2015 in that Nielsen Market Speed Rank Wins (# of Markets with #1 LTE Speed Ranking) Chart at 2:46 in the video. BingeOn looks like it has been a disaster for their network.

See this very interesting video from Sprint. Güenther Ottenforfer and John Saw respond directly to the recent negative news reports about Network spending and explain why they've been so quiet: Episode 3: Special edition of the Harrison Wiley Show with Güenther Ottenforfer and John Saw They directly responded to the questions the pundits, analysts and public have been asking: Sprint's not slowing down its network build. It is moving full speed ahead; Sprint's maintaining its strategy is to densify the network; Sprint's network build will not be disruptive to the customer experience. So you either take them at their word on this or not. Sprint has been releasing these "Harrison Wiley Show" videos on its "Yellow Fan Studios" YouTube Channel (Says "Sprint Creative Media" in fine print at the end). Here are other videos from the series: Episode 1: The Harrison Wiley Show with Güenther Ottendorfer Episode 2: The Harison Wiley Show - Episode 2 with Güenther Ottendorfer

Yeah, this is a very quick announcement for a 3rd Quarter 2015 Earnings Call. Less than 1 week of notice. For comparison to past practice, Sprint announced on January, 16th 2015 that it would hold its 3rd Quarter 2014 Earnings call on February 5, 2015 Interesting.

I'll bet this date was moved up by a week or two due to the recent news articles.

What else does Marcelo have to do to "right the ship" at this point?

I have a feeling Sprint will be sending out a bunch of these kinds of emails based on the fact that the access charges on the Family Share Packs announced on February 20, 2015 were waived for one year.... so through March 31, 2016 per Footnote 5 on that page.... and that's coming up soon.

When you believe you have a 300 year plan, it does seem that way doesn't it?

Lets see how Sprint does at the Superbowl this year. Per this Blog Post, they've been doing a lot of preparation: 2xCA on the stadium DAS, other network improvements for the region; COWs, etc. I'll bet Sprint's network performs very well this year. And the best part: Nearly all of those network improvements stay in place.... except for the COWs of course. Investing in the network for the Superbowl in each city/region each year pays off dividends in the long term.

They have to as far as I know. They can't comment on earnings before they are released.

Sprint is in the process of setting up a Network Leasing Company entity to provide funding for NGN, just like the Mobile Leasing Solutions entity was set up for handset leasing. These entities can tap additional funding as needed it seems. I agree. It's a shame Dan Hesse had to fight such headwinds and incompetence during his tenure. LTE Plus (and NGN subsequently) wouldn't exist without Network Vision, and Dan was hustled out the door by Masa by the time benefits were being realized from that. Marcelo had the full support and backing of Masa to clean house, and it shows.

I always thought a nice banner slogan for these COWs would be: "If you had Sprint, you'd be getting coverage right now."

We'll know more at the upcoming Fiscal 3Q15 earnings call, which hasn't been scheduled yet. The Fiscal 3Q14 Earnings Call happened on Thursday, February 5, 2015, so I'd expect it to be around the same time in February of this year: i.e. February 5, 2016 is a Friday.

Sprint isn't letting the stock tank. What do you want a statement to say? It would cost a tremendous amount of cash to rebrand Sprint. Sprint is better off putting that money into the network. Comcast rebranded itself Xfinity... and people still hate Xfinity... Big Game Sunday is February 7th, so that won't happen. On another note, Sprint seems very prepared for it this year, based on this Blog Post: Sprint has 2xCA on the Levi's Stadium DAS and made other network improvements (including 2xCA deployments) throughout the region. It's also bringing in 11 COWs to deploy around the region as well.

When does Dish have to use its spectrum holdings by? Is there a use/lose date?

SoftBank's ownership has to stay below 85%. Otherwise, it would trigger a tender offer for the remaining shares: .

The Zombie was actually for Unlimited My Way... The Hamster (voiced by Andrew Dice Clay) was in the ... Sprint Zombie for Unlimited My Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8tw94AKqOo Sprint Zombie for Unlimited Guarantee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z2WmdzihAo Sprint Zombie for Add-a-Line on Unlimited My Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGsImbTFvDc

I agree with you 100%. Sprint needs to do a much better job on this. The network improvements only mean so much if they aren't communicated well or at all to both current and prospective customers... And current customers are always prospective customers for someone else. I disagree. Yellow can be very appealing. You could make those T-Mobile style ads with Yellow, and they'd look just fine. Here's a nice YouTube video just posted by Qualcomm (January 19th) about Carrier Aggregation, as demonstrated on an HTC One A9, which clearly shows a difference in speed and performance for the average user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxGsC8-qWi8 It does a great job explaining in a clear visual way what Carrier Aggregation means... but why isn't Sprint doing something like this on its website or in a short commercial? How can Qualcomm do a better job at this than Sprint? Hopefully Roger Sole does a good job handling Sprint's marketing initiatives as the new CMO. Roger is replacing the current CMO, Kevin Crull, who is transitioning over to become one of Sprint's four area presidents (Central Region) as part of One Sprint. What's interesting here is that Kevin recently joined Sprint in May 2015 as CMO, so this is a pretty quick transition that he's making. Not sure what to make of that. Perhaps Marcelo feels Roger will handle marketing better than Kevin?

Being crowdsourced, isn't the number of AT&T users on Sensorly greater than the number of Sprint users due to the higher AT&T customer count vs. Sprint's customer count? Wouldn't that have an affect on the scope/coverage of the visualized mapping on Sensorly for AT&T vs. Sprint?

Does Ericsson play any role in optimizing Band 26 as part of its network management contract with Sprint? (Which is set to expire this year after 7 long years): http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-gains-network-advantage-innovative-network-services-deal-with-ericsson-delivers-competitive-edge.htm

I'm on the original iPhone Forever plan. Don't let me down Apple!